2017-03-02

We’ve upgraded our Apache Web server software to fix the security bug CVE-2016-8743.

Customers should not notice any changes, with one exception: The update makes Apache refuse to serve a page if you’re using some sort of code that outputs an invalid HTTP header. It would previously just ignore the header.

For example, this PHP script line has a bug, which is that it includes an extra space after “Expires”:

header ("Expires : Thu, 01 Dec 1994 16:00:00 GMT");

The web server software would previously ignore that problem, but now it leads to this in the error logs:

Response header name 'Expires ' contains invalid characters, aborting request

Similarly, this code contains a space in the words “Last Modified”:

header("Last Modified: $time");

Which causes this:

Response header name 'Last Modified' contains invalid characters, aborting request

The correct header name in that example should be Last-Modified, with a hyphen. Spaces are never allowed in HTTP headers.

If anything related to this happens to you, let us know and we can help you track down and fix it.

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